Nietzsche and Freud Views on Religion - Essay Example

In Freud's book, "Totem and Taboo", Freud postulates the ideas regarding the nucleus of primitive religion by adopting psychological concepts This research enabled Freud to form a nexus between the genres of psychology and religion. Critics have pointed out this fact as being instrumental for the rise of a phraseology called psychological reductionism in the schools of comparative religion1. Interestingly, though the great German philosopher Nietzsche and Freud both hold on the concept of something beyond the premises of religion, something that may or may not have the comfort of illusion., the two maestros had a difference of opinion on some basic levels. Nietzsche offers a strong criticism against religion, morality, and philosophy by using a blend of Enlightenment-inspired criticism and anti-Enlightenment attack on the life-negating aspects of modern culture. In Freud's study of the idea of Positivist origin, he broadly defines the causes and purpose of religion in three works, "Future of an Illusion", "Civilization and Its Discontents" and "Moses and Monotheism". He analyses the origin of the religions and flaunts the psychological debate regarding its cultural significance to mankind. To Freud, religion is a vital par of the processes of traditional civilization. He emphasizes on the premises of man's latent and primordial feelings and tries giving voices to those socially unsanctified wishes by trying to provide solutions to these repressed instinctual desires. Thus, religion is held as an illusion that can be compared to the definition of illusion provided by Marx (Communist Manifesto2, in his idea of false consciousness guiding the proletariats) that makes him remark that religion is the opium of the people3. Similar to Marx's assertion, Freud4 shows that religion is a function of the believers' inherent conviction of his faith and cannot be empirically or rationally justified. In his book, "The Future of an Illusion", he says that God is the paternalistic Christian God formed by the primitive human mind, in an effort to explain things beyond its ken and to rebuff the horrors that may arise due to ignorancy Freud also believes that from childhood, a traditional version of Christianity is infused within individuals, and which leads to an easy process of assimilation into our social and national consciousness of a culture. He also points out that this inculcation is so deep-rooted that things are never questioned and carry on as traditional knowledge. This hegemony, or social conditioning, continues even upon attaining maturity from where the religious illusions becomes prone to asserting a kind of social and psychological dogmatism, that suppresses questioning and doubt, and we retain that childish version of religion, even in becoming adults with acute powers of reasoning of rationality. Freud's answer does not lie in renouncing God, but rather, to grow up and switch to Logos, the god of Reason. In scientific terms, he only suggests a form of displacement reaction, only for what he considers a replacement of the bad by the better. Similar to Sartre's bad faith, and in line to the existentialist philosophists, renunciation, as according to Freud is impossible. Freud's explains Christianity from the loci of a patriarchal and phallic society, in which the father is a central figure (hence, his analysis of the subconscious as creating a father/protector god, someone to be both loved and feared). Thus, he propounds that the idea of religion emanates from the ardent wishes that lie latent within our subconscious and our neurotic selves: "Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father. [Consequently] a turning-away from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth" (Freud, 1927, chapter-VIII) In his analysis of religion in Chapter IV, Freud positions the human subjectivity at the centre of his theory. He analyses the urges of a child for his mother as the founding idea towards acquiring the "unconscious" taste for "the stronger father": something that he says replaces the security and adoration for the mother. In addition, the father "retains that position for the rest of childhood" and thereby retains this schizophrenic split or in his words a "peculiar ambivalence" towards his/her father. This "ambivalence in the attitude to the father [is] deeply imprinted in every religion[and] when the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, [and] can never do without protection against strange powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection". Thus, the need for protection against a person's weaknesses formulates in causing the discourse of the idea of God. However, more vitally these religious ideas transmit from the map of the traditional civilization to the behavioral instinct of an individual. Hence, religion becomes a replacement for many inherent, socially unsanctioned and latent wishes within the human mind. These provide so much strategic satisfactions to certain the latent demands that the human psyche starts desiring this illusion. Freud classifies these demands as an ordained form which is quite basic. He identifies these factors as thehe external natural forces, which caused fear and helplessness within our ancestral fathers, the internal forces of nature (lust, greed etc or biologically deterministic forces beyond our moral power) and man's universal longing for a father figure (Chapter II: The Mental Assets of Civilization). The inescapable reality of man's harsh life (later which gave rise to ideas of angst and existential alienation being violently jerked from one's metaphysical and transcendental roots) and its epistemological importance was not often clear to mankind. It is here that religion plays its part. Religion helps them accept their suffering and gives them optimism. Moreover, the mortal fears of death and the inevitability of extinction aided in bringing forward the suitable religious tenets of salvation, nirvana, karma and the idea of resurrection in various civilizations. Since man's latent unsanctified wishes, that which Freud called as the libido, tend to dominate his instincts, especially sexual, it makes him neurotic. Throughout history, Freud explains, the religious practices were seen as therapeutic and similar to those cures generally held as anti- neurotic. Hence, Freud puts religion as the collective neurosis that prevents people from falling into individual neuroses and psychoses. If this is true, the question of the lack of ego boundaries for most men when it comes to themselves and the world at large is something that needs to be investigated. Freud himself confessed that the idea of a superior authority or power looking over the activities of an individual's self helps to diminish the strong ego boundaries, something that makes a clear distinction between "self" and "not-self". Thus, it becomes impossible for a common person without imagination (Chapter I) and strong sense of the self to free himself from the simple-minded demands of religious beliefs. Freud strongly privileges the position of the rational, the scientific, the realistic and objective over the infantile and the ecstatic which he suggests that Kant's pure critique of reason must guide us from transcending into mature adults and here expounds his "pleasure principle" where he says that the: "Feeling of happiness derived from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse untamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that derived from sating an instinct that has been tamed". (Freud, 1927 pp 23) Religion, he claims, (Chapter VII: The Illusions of Civilization, I), has ruled civilization for many thousands of years and if one considers the concession that religion no longer has the sway that it once did, it is not because its promises have grown less, but rather that they have become less credible. (Nietzsche) It may well be that the scientific enterprise has exposed the holes in religious doctrines. However, unlike religion, the scientific spirit admires the search for truth. Freud thinks that so long as there are people who place truth above religious sentiment, there will be a further falling away from the religious point of view. In "Chapter X - Anticipated Objections: "Psychoanalysis is an Illusion" Freud expounds the notion of Western education that may help freed one the burden of religious doctrines but still may be ineffectual in diminishing its effect on the collective psychological or neurotic nature of humans. Freud notes that there has been some value in the belief in god, but do not think that this is reason enough to lose interest in the world and life. Freud also believes that scientific work can deliver us with better ideas of about reality, and thus increase our power to resist this illusion of comfortable notion of explanatory but false, omniscient and omnipotent Word of Christian religion. "If this belief is an illusion," he writes, "then we are in the same position as you. But science has given us evidence by its numerous important successes that it is no illusion." Science for him holds a better promise for the masses. It is a system that is based upon laws and proofs, that understands or attempts to understand a reality through hypotheses that are then criticized and are open to continuous criticism by virtue of which it actually evolves by a dialectical process of being proven and challenged as false and again developed further to be challenged again. Thus, the ultimate quest for Freud lies in blaming the nature of reality that exists outside this safe world of illusions. It is the sole enemy of man and is the source of all suffering, with which it is impossible to live, so that one must break off all relations with it if one is to be in any way happy. Man is protected from this disillusionment by religion. This takes us to the metaphysical root of Modernism that Freud ushered and that along with the scientific achievement of that era gave way to a frightening prospect of abandonment of God, which is where Nietzsche's deep agnostic words resound with a tragic desperation, when he says, "God is dead"5. Freud's question about the true nature of reality beyond that given by religion is the beginning of another question: ontology (study of being and existence), metaphysics (study of being and reality) and epistemology (nature and scope of knowledge and its belief). From Freud's enquiry into reality (or of illusion) starts the limitless existential exodus into Existentialism, having its origins in the 19th century thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. In its violent reaction against more traditional philosophies, such as rationalism (that Freud resorts to in his "The Future of an Illusion") and empiricism, that had its roots and beginnings in an ultimate order in metaphysical principles or in the structure of the observed world, existentialism. In such a condition, humans would always find themselves already in a world where they will be conscious of something and therefore man's existence shall precede his essence and he will be able to define his world in his own terms. In "Repetition", Kierkegaard's literary character Young Man laments6: "How did I get into the world Why was I not asked about it [and] not informed of the rulesbut just thrust into the ranks How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality Why should I be involved Isn't it a matter of choice And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager-I have something to say about this. Is there no manager To whom shall I make my complaint" (Kierkegaard, Sren. 1983)7 This remind one of the novel by Kafka called "Castle" (1926; Eng. trans., 1930).8 The interminable wait of the narrator K. for an answer (or to visit the Castle which contains the answer) is a labyrinthine nightmare, that reflects not only the nature of reality (here as bureaucratic) but also metaphorically raises issues about the disillusioning idea of Salvation, which is quite false. It painfully inflicts rejection without any answer. The world of randomization, of cruel misadventures for which man can never have an answer was the ultimate reality understood by the existentialists who found meaninglessness as the only meaning against definitive dictatorship of the religious metaphysics. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche wrote that human nature and human identity vary depending on what values and beliefs humans hold9 like Nietzsche's bermensch, which serves as an example of individuals who define the nature of their own existence and find values and meanings that to them are satisfactory. In the section "The Problem of Socrates" Nietzsche writes that nobody can estimate the value of life and that any judgment concerning it only reveals the judging person's life-denying or life-affirming tendencies, which is quite contrary to Freud's idea of a reality that may be surmised or understood through Reason. He attempts to portray philosophers from Socrates onwards as (in his own term) "decadents" who employ dialectics to no effect. Thus, in his proclamation "God is dead"10 Nietzsche addresses popular psychology of people for whom God is no longer a source of any moral code or teleology or purpose. Instead, Nietzsche recognizes the crisis, which the death of God represents for existing moral considerations, because: "When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident.... By breaking one main concept out of Christianity, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."11 For Nietzsche, the death of God is a way of saying that God has ceased to exist not physically but as a constrained truth and the only available truth. The death of God will lead, to a rejection of metaphysical order and of absolute values themselves. This nihilism is what Nietzsche worked to find a solution for by re-evaluating the foundations of human values where the Christian morality has no "foundation" to build on. Here he quite reiterates Freud's idea of illusion that is the basis of religion, being quite vague in its philosophy of God. His method in "Twilight of the Idols" is to examine philosophical claims by exposing the psychological conditions of the philosophers who have proposed them. The claim that interests him here is that human life is of little or no value. His task, then, is to discover the sources of the philosophers' anti-life attitude. Nietzsche analyzes the case of Socrates to uncover the origin of the anti-life attitude. Socrates used reason, in the form of dialectical argument, as a weapon against his enemies. He was able to humiliate them, but he never succeeded in convincing them. In general, reason is able to suppress instincts, but it is not able to eliminate them. Therefore, reason in general is no cure for a declining civilization and in fact, it becomes a sort of tyranny against it. According to Nietzsche, the body and its senses are extremely revelatory, and what they reveal is the basis of science. "Reason," on the other hand, turns features of the dynamic world revealed by the senses into "conceptual mummies," sucking the life out of everything it touches. Nietzsche's immoralist and anti-Christianity stems ultimately from his discovery of this life-affirming morality. "Free will"12 is an invention of theologians who want people to feel responsible for their actions (he improves on Freud's claim where he refuses to give the individual will much importance other than what their brains instinctively and unconsciously becomes conditioned to believe from childhood). Thus, Nietzsche's nihilism gives more optimism about the human condition and with concept of free will, which depends on making each one responsible for what they are, and thus sets a goal or purpose in life. This imposed will and motive is an error. This engenders feelings of guilt, which religious leaders use as an instrument of subjugation. He claims that there is nothing that could rule, measure, compare and judge our being. The healthy morality of the naturalist seeks to purge guilt from the world. By denying God, the immoralist denies responsibility, and in this way, the world is redeemed. Like Freud, Nietzsche claims that theological texts invent imaginary causes in order to "explain" pleasant (virtues) and unpleasant (vices) feelings. This appears to give men some measure of control over them or at least an explanation of them thereby making God an exalted omniscient presence who has all the answers (this is similar to what Freud explained by explaining that these mysterious instincts or events are a source of great fear to the helpless human mind). Nietzsche gives further measures against the forces of blind Christian reason by saying that Christianity, on behalf of those who are weak of will, declares the passions to be the enemy, and seeks to eradicate them. To oppose passion, one must spiritualize it and thus use intellect to gat past such instincts. However, this too is problematic in the Christian context, since it has waged war against intellect (as when Freud says that the ego has no boundaries with the world's ways in a person who is dominated by religion). In trying to destroy the passions, Christianity promotes quietude, but Nietzsche holds that we need opposition in order to achieve anything worthwhile. Like Freud after him Nietzsche considered religion a "neurosis" too; it involves and unnatural self-denial and sacrifice. Nietzsche here suggests that our modern penchant for science or nihilism, as atheistic as it appears at first glance, is merely a replacement for religious belief. Nietzsche is not unaware of the advantages that religion has brought to human society, even as it has debased human nature. It has helped humankind to tolerate an otherwise intolerable existence and has assisted us in a forming a social order by demanding that we love each other. But religion also has other essential socializing functions. Nietzsche observed that the end of the Christian-Platonic idea of truth would also make it possible to neutralize the Christian-Platonic poison of thinking about our world as something derivative, inferior, and merely apparent: "With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one."13 For those with strength enough for it, the collapse of Christian-Platonic ways of thinking (the "true/false world") opens a path of escape, of escape from the debilitating and oppressive effects of those regimes entirely. At the end of "Twilight of the Idols", Nietzsche holds a debate in the chapter called "What I Owe to the Ancients", here he talks about the ancient culture that is "still rich and even overflowing" enough to serve as the foundation for a modern generation of people.14 In the Hellenic culture Nietzsche finds a respect for will and nature. They also serve as a model for philosophy and religion.15 He closes this work by going further than he does in his other works: "Herewith I stand on the soil of which my intention, my ability grows-I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus-I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence."16 Nietzsche explains himself with an admiring attitude towards Thucydides, who for him presents his history of man for the sake of man. In Thucydides, the natural beauty of man is a gift to posterity. Nietzsche writes: "Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest misfortune of humanity so far."17 Far from despising the body, the Greeks revered the body was the source of creation; and the Greeks saw beauty in the thing most hated by Christianity: human nature. For Nietzsche, the Greek view of nature is the standard by which modern culture ought to be judged. Here Nietzsche echoes Freud in his insistence on questioning the Christian subjugation of the body and whereas Freud sees a religious mass infantile, Nietzsche merely finds inspiration in Greek culture that can serve as a model that may lead the masses from a desperate hatred for their being and becoming to their understanding of themselves. Perhaps the most important element that Nietzsche drew from Greek culture was the notion of the eternal: "Eternal life, the eternal return of life; the future promised and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death and change; true life as the over-all continuation of life through procreation, through the mysteries of sexuality."18 Dionysus is the god of becoming, and those who follow him are able to celebrate eternal becoming. In modern philosophy being has come to replace becoming. Nietzsche says that modern philosophers: "Think that they show their respect for a subject when they de-historicize it. Death, change, old age, as well as procreation and growth, are to their minds objections-even refutations. Whatever has being does not become; whatever becomes does not have being. Now they all believe, desperately even, in what has being. But since they never grasp it, they seek for reasons why it is kept from them.19 God as father is thus only one-way of looking at God.20 Freud is hence just dealing with a father-oriented notion of religion-a notion, which may not be applicable to the other religions, like, the Indic religious tradition or the Semitic. While Nietzsche concludes with overarching need that any human free spirit must remain free of the metaphysical seduction. Judging reality in Nietzsche's eyes is done through the lens of "religious" and decadent morality for it "reproaches those who are different" (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man" 34). The decadence then spreads outward from a personal disgust to articulation of disgust with life, a denial of life, a refusal to live life, and acceptance through a monological silencing of difference. However, unlike Freud, Nietzsche, despite this danger within moralities of the modern age, sees possibilities for hope. His affirmation of life and creation arising in the natural rhythms language employs in the saying of these perspectives in meeting reality that envelops human life, the natural world. In Chapter IV: 'Morality as Anti-Nature' he says that all "healthy morality", comprises an instinctive response to the outside and inside of man. The Antinatural morality, on the other hand is "virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught", (Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols" 'Morality as Anti-Nature' chap. 4) Both Freud and Nietzsche quite come to rest parallely on these lines: ""When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values" (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature" 5). Works Cited 1. Ackermann, Robert John. "Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look" (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 4-5. 2. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "Theories of Primitive Religion" (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), chapter 2. 3. Freud, S. "The Future of an Illusion" (1927). Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1968 4. Kafka, F. "The Castle". Tr. Willa and Edwin Muir. London: Secker & Warburg; New York: Knopf, 1930. Definitive edition, with additional material, 1954 5. Kierkegaard, Sren. "Repetition in Kierkegaard's Writings", vol. 6, Princeton University Press, 1983 6. Luper, Steven. "Existing". Mayfield Publishing, 2000, p.4-5, 11 7. Marx, K. & Engels, F. (1848), "The Communist Manifesto"; Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume One, Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR, 1969, pp. 98-137; Translated: Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888; Proofed: and corrected against 1888 English Edition by Andy Blunden 2004; Copyleft: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1987, 2000. Extracted from internet source on 2.04.07 < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm> 8. Marx, K. "Works of Karl Marx 1843: Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right", Karl Marx in Deutsch-Franzsische Jahrbcher, February, 1844, Proofed and corrected by Andy Blunden, February 2005; extracted from internet source, on 2.04.07 < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm> 9. Nietzsche, F. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs by Friedrich Nietzsche; translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, March 1974. 10. Nietzsche, F. "Twilight of the Idols", trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale; Expeditions of an Untimely Man, sect. 5 11. T. M. P. Mahedevan. Outlines of Hinduism (Bombay: Chetana Limited, 1960), p. 91. Read More